It's midday at the Price Chopper on Hoosick Road in Troy, and the woman with the long braid and the sad bearing nudges her cart through the checkout at aisle 12.

The young man at the register scans her paper plates and generic toaster pastries. She hands him money. He hands her change. Spotting something unusual in her cart, he gives it a funny look. He gives her a funny look. Then she nudges her cart away, and he swaps baffled comments with a fellow cashier.

"Cut!" yells Daniel Garcia from behind a camera. And then they all go back and prepare to do it again: the paper plates, the toaster pastries, the money, the funny looks.

"One last time, one last time," Garcia assures everyone. Scene 21, Take 4. "We're rolling, rolling," says the assistant director, Rick Rossett, wearing a beanie and an all-business manner.

But one last time turns into another, and then another, and then another. Such is the nature of filmmaking — and one brief moment in "H," a micro-budgeted independent film being shot through the month in Troy.

"Repetition. It's all repetition," says Rania Attieh, Garcia's filmmaking partner, as she hustles to set up another shot. Late last year, she and Garcia scored funding from the Venice Film Festival's Biennale College initiative for their movie, a study of two women named Helen in the the run-up and aftermath of a meteor explosion. No worries: Troy is not incinerated. No planet-killing sci-fi cataclysms are in the offing.

"No, it's less like Armageddon than like the meteor that hit the Russian town," says Pierce Varous, one of the film's producers. In other words, there are no climactic moments featuring Bruce Willis "trying to dynamite the thing, and he has to save Ben Affleck because his daughter's in love."

But the meteor brings strange days and strange happenings, and they're starting to happen — maybe — as the braided lady noses her cart through Price Chopper. Played by Robin Bartlett of "Inside Llewyn Davis" and "Mad About You," she is literally a Helen of Troy.

"I'd never been in Troy ... but I love it. I love the history of it. Everyone has wonderful stories," said Bartlett on a break between takes. In the current scene, she explains, "Something's begun to happen. But we don't know yet. It's pre-explosion."

The filmmakers, aiming to be similarly cryptic about the oddity in the cart, ask me not to identify it. I'll say this much: It's small, peculiar and creepy. No wonder the kid at checkout looks a little weirded out.

That element is just one factor in "H," a feature-length tale that the Texas-born Garcia and Lebanese Attieh had originally conceived for a New York City setting. But then a friend of a friend they met at a party mentioned an artist's residency at EMPAC — the pair are artists as well as filmmakers — and that sparked their interest in upstate.

"Rania said, 'Hey, this Troy town seems kinda cool. Maybe we should think about setting it in that area,'" Garcia recalled. That, in turn, inspired the classical reference and the double shot of Helens in the script.(The other Helen is played by Rebecca Dayan, of "Limitless" and "Celeste & Jesse Forever.")

The Gucci-sponsored Venice program, now in its second year, provides around $209,000 to each of three filmmaking projects. The prize also includes mentoring, tutoring and a slot at the 71st Venice film fest, scheduled from Aug. 27 to Sept. 6 — just five months away.

The cast and crew of "H" are now in a rush to complete it. But on balance, Varous says, the deadline pressure is a small price to pay for the reassurance that their film will premiere somewhere — and somewhere big. Normally, "It's this very complicated dance that you have to do" to assure and secure a screening, he says. "To know that this is going to play in Venice — that's very unique."

Back in aisle 12, the young cashier — Nicholas Turner, an actor from Niskayuna — chats about his previous film work. Last summer, he worked as a precision driver in a chase scene shot in Rochester for "The Amazing Spider-Man 2." Before that, he had a speaking part in "The Place Beyond the Pines" — or he did. "It ended up getting cut. You can see me for two seconds in it. In the party scene."

Santia Lind, a Price Chopper supervisor cast as the second cashier, doesn't expect to switch careers anytime soon. "I think I was too stiff," she says.

Bartlett, meanwhile, is the opposite of stiff. Even in her brief exchanges at checkout, her open, expressive face conveys both a world of hurt and a challenge to anyone who might look her way and judge her.

"Robin," says Rossett, "this is your Oscar-winning shot."

They move the camera for a fresh angle. Two takes later, Bartlett rolls away, easing toward the restrooms as the camera tracks her exit. She and her cart full of groceries and strangeness hang a left through the swishing front doors.